"No one is illegal" is one of the most important
political campaigns and network initiatives of the 90s
in the Federal Republic of Germany. Starting from the
Hybrid Workspace at the "documenta X" (1997),
it was designed as a hybrid project of artistic and
political practice from the beginning. Diverse groups
relate to "No one is illegal" or consciously
distance themselves from the project, just as the campaign
itself related to the "sans-papiers" movement
in France and wanted to establish differences from traditional
anti-racist initiatives. The international cooperation
from the beginning of the campaign is now continued,
after more than five years, primarily through its integration
in the "No Border" network that has been created
in the meantime.

"No one is illegal" has linked a multitude
of anti-racist activities in complex political and aesthetic,
e.g. (pop) cultural alliances. The beginning of the
campaign was marked by an appeal that was developed
at "documenta X". It was addressed to those
who are actually responsible for action in the majority
of the society, and therefore refrained from reformist
demands addressed to the state, left out moral arguments
of traditional concerned politics and paternalist approaches.
In this context, at the start of "No one is illegal"
there were supportive infrastructures in the foreground,
such as counseling organizations for illegalized people,medical
care projects, the wandering churches asylum in Western
Germany, support for so-called stowaways in international
sea traffic on the North German coasts, and the first
border camps in East Germany at the Schengen outside
border to Poland. Meanwhile, these border camps no longer
take place only at territorial borders, but rather address
inner and virtual borders as well. Camp 2001, for example,
focused on the Frankfurt Rhine-Main airport, and the
international camp 2002 in Strasbourg on the digitally
organized border of the Schengen Information System
(SIS), with headquarters in Alsace. In 1998 (a federal
election year), "No one is illegal" supported
caravans initiated by exile groups in Germany for the
rights of refugees and migrants.

In 2000 "No one is illegal" founded the sub-campaign
"deportation.class", which is intended to
move the national airlines Lufthansa to give up the
business of deportation flights by sullying their image.
With its methods, deportation.class also took leave
of traditional ideas of anti-racist work. Sullying the
corporate identity of Lufthansa and disrupting their
symbol management is simultaneously a rejection of an
identity-political approach of their own. In other words:
the public appearance of deportation.class no longer
reproduces the aesthetic codes and cultural imaginings
of their own scene for the purpose of mobilizing this
scene, but is instead a direct symbolic tool. The mobilization
of their own scene relies on the content of the goal
of preventing deportations and fighting for residence
rights.

The first online demonstration in the Federal Republic
of Germany also took place in the course of "deportation.class",
a virtual sit-in on the Lufthansa servers. With over
10,000 participants, the online demonstration also queried
the possibilities for political and activist action
in virtual space through electronic disturbance. At
the same time, it impelled renewed discussions, for
example about the extent to which (virtual) campaign
politics is separated from social practice or immanent
to the media: what significance does the contradiction
between electronic disturbance and the freedom of information
attain. From the beginning, "No one is illegal"
made use of electronic tools like the Internet. In the
self-descriptions published there, but not only there,
it says that the campaign "conjoins radical political
demands with tactical media understanding and a presence
in the art discourse". This makes it a hybrid praxis,
i.e. one that conjoins art, media and politics. The
declamatory character is a program designed to attain
hybridity, on the one hand, on the other it extrapolates
actual approaches. Since the beginning of the campaign,
political activists, theoreticians, media activists,
fine artists, musicians, designers, etc. have all collaborated
in it. The interplay of the experience they bring with
them and the respectively acquired know-how results
in a moment of the strength of no one is illegal. To
avoid misunderstandings: it is not the simple attribution
of roles, for example among artists, theoreticians or
political activists, that this praxis describes, or
even ethnifying models, but rather the collected common
experiences. Apart from these experiences in common,
there are also conjunctions of discussions that develop
with the different emphases of musicians, artists, political
activists, theoreticians, or journalists, for example.
And previous participation in sometimes contradictory
political, cultural or social discourses is continued.
The overlapping of competencies or working in hybrid
contexts takes place against the foil of specializations
and socializations, which cannot be completely dissolved
and do not want to be. This is already evident in that
some prefer political working groups, concrete social
projects and theoretical research, whereas others choose
practice space or the studio in their praxis. What arches
over these focal points are personal desires, a wish
for an energy charge and the attainment or recovery
of the power of definition.

It is precisely in this open contradictoriness, the
vague situations and transversal conditions that the
productive option is found. This is not perceived automatically,
but always in concrete actions with concrete difficulties.
This presupposes not only recognizing the respective
situative options for action, but also an interest in
not pretending there are no contradictions. The goal
is not a kind of purity in discourses or - to use a
different image - not a debugging, but rather dealing
with a dirty configuration, which works with a restart,
in case the thing gets stuck. This is an approach that
is aware of the difficulties confronting hybrid praxis.
Although these difficulties may be glossed over in theory
or in mobilization and marketing strategies, e.g. in
references to one's own superior - because more lofty
- aims, but in practice they persist as a challenge.
The dichotomy of politics and art does not only exist
in the gallery market or in traditional museum operations,
but rather also in left-wing or autonomous contexts.
There, however, it is superseded by a specific set of
hierarchies.

What one of the hierarchizations imagines for art is
that it has an auxiliary relationship to a political
core. This idea, which is indebted to political organizational
work devolved from both bourgeois and left-wing traditions,
does not perceive artistic production as an independent
expression of content or as a possibility for gaining
insight, but rather as a handicraft realization of contents
that are rooted and decided elsewhere.

For the border camp 1998 in Rothenburg, political activists
proposed setting up a "Memorial to the Unknown
Escape Helper". The idea was to set up a kind of
stone stele. Artists active in the campaign were asked
to help with the further realization. Instead of the
stele, they suggested an "Exercise Path: Fit for
Escape Help". The "Exercise Path" consisted
of several blue signs on poles, which were to be set
up along the German-Polish border. The signs recommended
certain exercises, beginning with simple physical training
and turning into tasks for secretly crossing the border,
including such difficult techniques as preparing alias
documents. In one way, the "Exercise Path"
grew out of the further development of a work by one
of the artists involved in the campaign, the so-called
"Exercise Path for Artists in Training", but
in another also out of the awareness of and reflections
on the debate about the "Holocaust Memorial"
in Berlin that was going on at the time. The position
on the question of what a monument is, which is entirely
comprehensible in the artistic context, was transferred
in the context of political activists to enrich demonstration
culture. Instead of banners, signs were carried and
set up. The artistic work was absorbed by the activist
political culture, but it did not change any existing
ideas. The procedure remained the practiced one: the
"demonstrators" marked their content and the
accompanying police removed infringements against public
order. "The Exercise Path: Fit for Escape Help"
was documented with a mobilization video, copied and
distributed. In the picture, it shows the demonstrators
on their way to set up the "Exercise Path",
and the soundtrack supplies the recorded radio messages
of the corresponding police dispatch from the off.

This integration of artistic working methods in a political
action can be read at first as an outstanding hybrid
realization. It is only at a second glance that the
dilemma becomes apparent: in the course of integration,
the aesthetic issue disappeared. Even in the video documentation
prepared directly afterward, there is no more indication
of the "Memorial to the Unknown Escape Helper".
Instead, it refers to the confrontation with the police
that is popularly used to establish identity in political
activism. The disappearance of the aesthetic statement
was accelerated and facilitated by bringing the "Exercise
Path" into a collective project at the camp and
consciously dispensing with authorship in the sense
of the copyleft movement. In this way, the address for
criticism and feedback also disappeared. The demonstration
was enriched through an idea for action, but the aesthetic
discussion came to a standstill. This means that it
needs a restart next time. Because the link "memorial"
is missing, it will not be possible to refer to experiences.
In the course of preparations for the second border
camp from no one is illegal, several musicians explained
that for practical reasons, they would not be able to
perform under their well known band name, but only under
a name created especially for this occasion. It briefly
became transparent, which role artists assume in the
context of political action: in the preparation plenum,
disappointment was formulated, a performance under a
different name was considered useless, since it would
not have a mobilizing function.

In traditional models of organization, the phenomenon
would not be interesting beyond this. Of course, a political
party, a union, a business or other corporation is happy
to adorn itself with artists - and artists can profit
from this as well in terms of image transfer. In the
context of hybrid practice, however, this remains theoretically
surprising and practically irritating, because it perpetuates
precisely the separation that is supposed to be overcome.
There is less friction involved, for example, in the
way the form of a benefit concert works. It allows all
the participants - as a political context for the organizers,
an artistic context for the bands, and the location
operators as a sometimes commercial infrastructure -
to act, largely undisturbed, alongside one another,
mutually energizing one another. Exhibitions of posters
and flyers work the same way. They can serve to accompany
a so-called content-based event or even constitute it.

A second hierarchy becomes apparent in the attention
economy, which is attributed to the various media and
practices used in the campaign. Roughly overstated:
the preliminary preparation and subsequent treatment
of text-based theory development usually triggers substantial
discussions, debates and positioning attempts. The selection
of videos for a film night is based on an immanently
political rationale. For posters and flyers, every plenum
claims competence, whereas the selection of musical
contributions is entrusted to a special working group,
and the production from the broad field of performing
or fine arts is sorted for an accompanying entertainment
program. The distribution of content-based attention
in the hybrid decision-making process thus largely follows
that of the majority society. The greatest political
relevance is attributed to text and picture media, which
correlates to our own habits of consumption. The consumer
preference corresponds to controls in production. Drafting
texts is a highly frictional process obligated to find
a consensus, and the selection of picture material is
subject to rules of political content, not aesthetic
content.

A third hierarchy attaches to the body. The more obviously
the body and especially the possibly endangered body
is brought into conjunction with content, the more relevant
its politicity is read to be. In the hybrid context,
this can generate an order that imagines political practice
based on the cliché of the streetfighter, rather than
perceiving real practice that is also social practice.
In the organization of the border camps, for example,
this hierarchy generates independent, so-called protective
structures with a military habitus and accordingly outmoded
charged meaning, all the way to a gender-specific distribution
of roles. The hierarchy attached to the body is also
evident in the censorship of mechanical and digital
symbol production in the context of political activism.
The prohibition of photography or video recordings and
audio recordings is based on a hierarchical consideration,
which maintains that the body is jeopardized particularly
by recordings. The prohibition on preparing picture
and sound material at the Border Camp 2002 in Strasbourg,
for example, generated nothing but absurdity: due solely
to reasons of urban development, the state law enforcement
agents retained a documentation of all the bodies in
the Strasbourg camp, while this was refused to the camp
participants. At the same time, the prohibition revealed
a lesser valuing of artistic procedures in the production
of symbols in comparison with bodily actions. In the
logic of hierarchization attached to the body, symbol
production becomes inauthentic and is grasped and used,
at best, as adornment. The meaningfulness of art in
the context of political activism is most likely to
be accepted with the argument that backup can be found
in art or - if the argument becomes entirely banal -
that this is a way to get funding. The lightness of
the argument is rooted in the stance that art can be
of service here, because it can be applied financially.
At the same time, this argument neglects addressing
the contents of aesthetic production and the conditions
of the art business. In the case of other alliances
deemed political, this would be taken for granted. This
shows, on the one hand, that the so-called "backup"
presumes a separation of art and politics. On the other
hand, though, it also leads the cooperation promoted
as "backup" to adopt the curator model from
the art field in hybrid practice, but without adopting
the institution-critical reflections on this model that
are possible in art. To put it roughly, this results
in "scene curators" that claim and realize
representation at the intersection between art and hybrid
practice, but in such a way that their aesthetic, political
or personal strategies cannot be questioned. The emergence
of curating is also fostered in that the traditions
of museum operations correlate to the set of hierarchies
sketched out here.

This also marks the lines of conflict in hybrid practice
that can be identified through key words such as representation,
strategic or tactical understanding of the respective
practice, especially, however, at the level of identity-political
approaches. Identity politics, here understood as gaining
political agency through the construction of identity
through methods of inclusion/exclusion, may be politically
necessary as a temporary platform, but as a long-term
strategy, it supports the reproduction of relationships
of domination.

For this reason, it has always been the aim of the
hybrid practice of "No one is illegal" not
to fix identities, but rather the opposite: to seek
intersections, transitions, dissolutions, tactical common
interests, or at least productive misunderstandings.
This means that the practice conjoining art and politics
sometimes appears feasible as plug and play, even when
its hybridity calls for a restart.